Sunday, August 07, 2016

Then and now

Passing by the bright turquoise, sun-splashed wall of a nearby burger place the other day, J said, "Thirty years ago, you might have seen me and my friends right there, riding our bikes and buying records." The burger place was a record store back then. And so there are many places around here that resound with memories of J's heady summer childhood days. His high school, the beach where dad took them so often, dad's old house where someone else now lives, and places like this record store which were such an important part of J's teenage years.

It gives this city a strange old-new feeling. I have been here but a few seasons and yet for J it is part of his memories, and that too of a time in his life when he first forged his own path. Now here we are, rebels both still in some sense of the word, seeing the city through our two pairs of very different eyes.

And so I have begun seeing ghost images of J, very young and blond, at certain places that have been around since his youth. Will I see us as we are now, if we come back here when we are both old?